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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll turn to El Salvador, home of the CECOT prison, where the Trump administration exported 238 migrants last week. Most of the migrants were of Venezuelan descent and were subjected to deportation under the premise of belonging to the transnational gang, Tren de Aragua. Others included Salvadorans thought to be members of MS-13. In a podcast appearance on Friday, the Venezuelan interior minister claimed that none of the Venezuelans imprisoned in El Salvador were members of gangs. After viewing the list of deportees and cross-checking it with the organizational chart of Tren de Aragua, he also expressed his belief that what's happening in El Salvador is the establishment of a concentration camp. "Anyone who agrees with what the United States and El Salvador are doing is a barbarian," said that interior minister of Venezuela. Families of the migrants sent to El Salvador also claim their loved ones were not gang affiliated. Of course, that's a matter of contention on the two sides, but some recognize their family members in promotional videos from the CECOT prison, while others do not know whether their relatives are still in detention in the United States or in El Salvador.

Now, this issue has sparked what some view as a constitutional crisis in the United States, as a judge ordered the Trump administration to halt the deportation of the migrants as they had not been granted hearings in court. The planes were not turned back, as you probably know, and the administration has not provided answers to some of the questions the judge has been asking. Some developments in the last few days focus more attention down there.

Over the weekend, President Trump rescinded legal status of an estimated 500,000 migrants from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Cuba, who entered the country over the last two years. Their legal status is set to expire now on April 24th. Also, over the weekend, Venezuela announced it will resume taking deportees from the US, being returned to that country. Their refusal was one of the reasons the alleged gang members wound up in El Salvador. Joining me now to break down some of this is New York Times reporter Annie Correal, who covers the region. Annie, hi. Welcome back to WNYC.

Annie Correal: Thank you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start on that point. Some of the migrants deported were from El Salvador. The majority of them were Venezuelan nationals. Were they sent to prison in El Salvador in the first place because Venezuela wouldn't take them back?

Annie Correal: Well, I think we have to step back a little. The Trump administration has a Venezuela problem. By that I mean that there are a lot of Venezuelans who came into the United States over the last several years and the Trump administration has vowed, Trump himself starting with his-- the beginning of his campaign, vowed to address this issue, said that he was going to get migrants out of the US. The people who had come in during this surge. He focused specifically on Venezuelans and on the Tren de Aragua gang.

What that means for Venezuelans is very specific, because the Maduro government, Venezuela's leader, has refused to take regular deportation flights. Trump needs to find out where he can put these people. If Venezuela isn't going to take its own citizens, he's said he would send them wherever they would be welcome. He has sort of been going, the Trump administration has been going country to country, kind of finding places where they can send Venezuelans if they can't go back to their own home country.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you a follow up question. Why are they locked in a prison rather than just deported there?

Annie Correal: Here's the situation. When Rubio, when Secretary of State Rubio went on his first trip, he went to Central America. He goes to El Salvador, and the leader of that country, Nayib Bukele, makes this really unusual offer. He says, "Listen, I know that you're trying to deport people, and we would be more than happy to take your deportees in our prison system for a fee. Anyone convicted of a crime can come to our country, regardless of their nationality."

Marco Rubio calls this an extraordinary offer of friendship and says, "We're going to have to evaluate the legal aspects." At the time, this just seems quite outlandish, that a foreign leader would offer his own prison system for American detainees, at the time, he says, including US citizens and residents.

Brian Lehrer: We should say-

Annie Correal: Flash forward to about a week ago-

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Annie Correal: -and we see that the US has decided to take Mr. Bukele up on his offer and to send people in US detention to a prison in El Salvador.

Brian Lehrer: These migrants, though suspected of gang activity, have not been, for the most part, or maybe any of them, you tell me, charged with or convicted of a crime in the United States, correct?

Annie Correal: We don't know exactly the breakdown of who has been charged and who has been convicted, but the picture that's emerging of this group is that not all of the people who were sent to El Salvador faced criminal charges. Many of them seem to have been asylum seekers. Men who entered the United States and were petitioning for asylum. They were seeking to stay here in the US. We've spoken to around two dozen families, both in Venezuela and spouses in the US, who say that their partners, their sons were caught up in this sweep. That they were basically targeted because they had tattoos.

They went to what they thought were going to be routine hearings before immigration authorities, and because they had certain tattoos that have been connected to the Tren de Aragua gang, they were detained. Now, from the families that we're talking to, most of these men were detained after Mr. Trump took office. After Trump took office in January, these men were then not allowed to go home. Their families, their lawyers were scrambling to try to figure out bond hearings and try to challenge their detention, when suddenly, out of the blue, they learned that they were no longer in the US and had been sent to El Salvador.

Many of these families learned that by seeing the video and the photos that had been released by the Salvadoran government. They spotted their son, their husband in those images that were circulated around the world of the deportees in the white T shirts, the shorts, their heads were shaved, they were handcuffed. They were very dramatic images. That is how many of the Venezuelan families learned that their loved ones had been deported to El Salvador.

Brian Lehrer: The prisons in El Salvador, very much including the one in question here, are notorious for being harsh. I've heard it reported that President Bukele there boasts about this openly and considers it a point of pride. How much is that true, based on your reporting?

Annie Correal: Along with the images, like the ones we saw a week ago, Bukele's prisons really have been his calling card. He doesn't want to portray these places as pleasant or any place you would want to end up. It's his way of saying, "You break the law, you're going to end up behind bars in these maximum security facilities like CECOT, the Terrorism Containment Center," which is a massive complex. It's sort of several jails within a larger perimeter wall, and people who go there essentially just don't come out.

I spoke to a filmmaker last week who said that she had visited the prison very recently, and inmates there sleep on metal bunks. They are in their cells 23 and a half hours a day. They eat with their hands, because they can't have utensils, and I think most memorably, she said that they weren't allowed visitors, not even virtual visits. Indefinitely. Many of the people held at CECOT, at the Terrorism Containment Center, are facing sentences of as long as 200 years. It's a bit of a black hole.

Now, the prison system in general, Human Rights Watch has come out and said that there's overcrowding, there are allegations of torture, and many of the people who have ended up in Bukele's prison system have been arrested in mass arrests which were ordered through a state of emergency. As many as 85,000 people, in a tiny country, have ended up imprisoned in El Salvador. The authorities there say, "There's a margin of error when we are trying to round people up and address our gang problem. We are going to bring in innocent people, but those people are later going to be released."

There is a little bit of a conflicting account there, but what we do know is that the prison system is very large. In many cases, it's very crowded. The place CECOT, this kind of the crown jewel in Bukele's prison system is this mega prison, which is not necessarily crowded, but it certainly is impenetrable. It's a place where lawyers, where human rights watchdogs, there's very little access to what happens behind those prison walls.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we're talking about the 200 plus, is the number I keep seeing reported, Venezuelan deportees, mostly Venezuelan, to this prison that was just being described, in El Salvador. My guest is Annie Correal, New York Times correspondent covering Central America. Most of the coverage in this country has been about the dispute and really the confrontation, at this point, between Trump and the judge who had ordered those flights to be turned around after they took off, and Trump's unresponsiveness to answering the judge's questions about that.

We are focusing now more on conditions in Central America, in El Salvador, in that prison in particular, and things related to those individuals, those families in those countries. If anybody with a connection to El Salvador or Venezuela wants to call in, we invite your calls or your texts. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or anyone else with a question or a comment, 212-433-9692. Annie, here's a text. Listener writes, "Is there also an Eighth Amendment issue in using foreign prisons with horrific standards for people arrested in the US?"

That's a great question, because for people who don't know, the Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution is the one that prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. It sounds like this prison specializes in cruel and unusual punishment. You're not a lawyer, so I don't know if the Eighth Amendment applies to people being deported and the conditions in another country, but it's a central question. Does the Eighth Amendment apply here?

Annie Correal: What I can say, Brian, is that many of the rights that anyone has when they're on US soil vanish the minute that you are sent to a foreign country. Maybe your listener recalls that this isn't the first group of Venezuelans that the Trump administration has sent elsewhere. It also sent a large group to Guantanamo. When lawyers argued that those men had been deprived of their right to legal counsel, abruptly, the Trump administration removed those men from Guantanamo and sent them back to Venezuela via Honduras.

Guantanamo is a US naval base. As we recall, from 9/11 and the aftermath, the long aftermath, the detainees there were able to have lawyers, to fall under American laws. Now, when you send someone to El Salvador, or to any other country, they vanish from the US system. That's what some of these Venezuelan families have told us. That as they were searching for their relatives in the detainee locator of the immigration system, their records had just disappeared. They're falling into kind of a gray area, legally.

We understand that Venezuela, for example, its government has been furious over the removal of these migrants to El Salvador and there could be diplomatic conversations over how those men could get out of the prison in El Salvador.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts, "When Hegseth, the defense secretary, was found to have a tattoo associated with white supremacists, this was shrugged off, by the right, but Venezuelans are dubbed gang members by virtue of tattoos?" It's a rhetorical question, but it's a good point to make that kind of comparison. Another listener writes, "If Trump is deporting these people to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, which requires some sort of war or invasion, wouldn't these people be prisoners of war and afforded the rights of the Geneva Convention prohibiting, for example, the public dissemination of photographs, et cetera?"

Have you heard that one before? If Trump is invoking this thing and this claim, which he is making, accurate or not, that these alleged gang members were sent as agents of the Maduro government to harm the United States, therefore an act of war, therefore they can be sentenced and deported to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, then would they be protected by the Geneva Convention as prisoners of war?

Annie Correal: I haven't heard that one. I think that the argument that the gang is representative of the government is-- is the argument that the government's making that this constitutes an invasion? At the same time, they've designated the Tren de Aragua gang as a terrorist group, which is not a governmental entity, and have labeled all of these men as terrorists. There's a little bit of just lack of clarity in terms of what definition the government is giving to the Tren de Aragua gang as it opposes-- we don't want to get too much into the crisis with the judge, but I think that's where a lot of the focus has been.

How is the government going to argue? How is it going to justify the deportation of these men? How is it going to justify the continued use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport really whoever it wants to? I think one of the most interesting things is that in the backlash to Judge Boasberg's order, the Trump administration has said, "Judges and civil society, no one has any right to question executive power and what designation the Trump administration is using to conduct such deportations." It is a question that is probably going to transcend this specific group and apply to deportations going forward.

Brian Lehrer: How does that gang act in Venezuela, by the way? If your reporting doesn't indicate that the Maduro regime sent them here, in any way, as an agent of the Venezuelan state, or as agents, how does that gang act in Venezuela, and what is their relationship with the Maduro government, if you know?

Annie Correal: The gang itself, Tren de Aragua, appears to have started within the Venezuelan prison system, which did grow massively under the Maduro regime. It is known to, for example, its leaders are known to extort people even in other countries, from prison. It was a prison gang. There are a lot of gangs that are functioning from behind the walls of jails throughout Latin America. It has spread throughout Latin America and isolated incidents began to appear within the last few years in the US. During his campaign, Trump made it a priority to focus on Tren de Aragua, which he sort of lumped a lot of Venezuelan migrants in with the Tren de Aragua, and some of the violent acts that it was known to have committed.

I think there's a parallel there with, listeners might remember, Trump's sort of fixation on MS-13, a gang with strong Salvadoran ties, during his first term. This is sort of part of Trump's playbook, to focus on violent gangs and to create a strong link, in the public imagination, between the gang and the group of migrants. Now, the Trump administration, when it talks about deporting Venezuelans, it says explicitly, including Tren de Aragua members. In some ways, it's painting with a very broad brush, the many, many migrants who have arrived in Venezuela during the last years, by focusing specific-

Brian Lehrer: From Venezuela.

Annie Correal: -in this gang. From Venezuela to the US, yes. Ricardo

Brian Lehrer: Ricardo, in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Ricardo.

Ricardo: Yes, Brian, hi. I have a comment about your guest talking about all the bad things that Bukele has done. He should comment also on how it was Salvador before him. It was a society that it was terrorized, and they used to tattoo themselves as M-13, so people will know that they were part of the gang. Now they're trying to take those tattoos off. Why? Because Bukele took the society back to the people, to the citizens, to the country. These scum and cancer of the society are where they should be.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, Bukele is very popular, as I understand it, in El Salvador, because of his harsh crackdown on crime, which has apparently reduced crime. I'll get Annie's reporting on that in a second. Ricardo, are you comfortable, even if all of that is true, with the United States deporting people into that harsh prison system who were not criminals in El Salvador?

Ricardo: Well, I think the justice should be followed, and they should have some process before they actually get to be deported to that country, but it is also a fact that that Tren de Aragua, whatever it is, is in, as your guest said, in all South America and Central America and everywhere now. Now, since it's year two, I guess, with tough hands on things, has to be done somehow and it has to be done fast. The problem with the justice sometimes is that it's too slow. It's like it doesn't really get what it should.

Brian Lehrer: Ricardo, thank you very much. Of course, I know a lot of other listeners will say, if justice needs to be slow in order to protect people's rights, then so be it. Another listener texts, all the way to the other side from that caller, text says, "We're disappearing people, full stop. This is not normal." Annie, what is Bukele's popularity in El Salvador? He's a leader and it's a country that many Americans are not familiar with.

Annie Correal: Yes. Ricardo, the caller is not alone. Bukele has tremendous popularity, not just in El Salvador, which I should note is a very small country with outsized popularity in the region and beyond. Bukele has become a model for leaders from Honduras to Ecuador, as someone who's taken on just a virulent, stubborn gang problem and turned his country from the homicide capital of Central America to one of the safest countries in the region.

A lot of people, throughout Latin America, I think, look at El Salvador and say, "Whatever it takes. We too, are dealing with just impossible levels of violence, fear. Our kids can't play outside, we can't go to the ATM. We too, would embrace a model like this." Critically, they've said, "Even if it comes at the cost of certain civil liberties, that's something that we're willing to accept." We do see that this is something that has-- many countries have said, "Democracy has failed. We're willing to take on, to vote in and to keep people in power like Bukele," who has been called an authoritarian leader and really embraced that title.

He's called himself world's coolest dictator, and has really used social media to take on whatever criticism there has been of his leadership. One thing I do want to say before we wrap up, is that experts and people I've spoken to have really asked me to focus, asked us as an organization and as journalists, to focus on the fact that Bukele may have another reason for having negotiated this very unusual deal with the Trump administration to take in deportees in his prison system. Namely, that Bukele himself has come up, his name has come up in the course of the US bringing MS-13 leaders to the United States to stand trial.

Now, let me unpack that a little bit. There's good evidence that Nayib Bukele, years ago, negotiated with MS-13 leaders to bring down the homicide rates in El Salvador. He offered these gang leaders privileges in prison, the ability to keep running their organization in exchange for publicly bringing down the murder rate, because that would lead to more support for his administration. Now, he also told them, "We will not allow you to be extradited." Meaning, sent to the United States for trial.

Over the years, some of these MS-13 leaders have been arrested in other countries like Mexico, extradited to the US, and the Department of Justice has really, under Biden, was really focused on getting these guys, getting MS-13, dismantling the organization, taking down its leadership. Now, Bukele is afraid that if those guys stand trial, if those MS-13 leaders stand trial, a lot will come out about his administration and its pact with the gangs to bring down the murder rate.

Many think that that is his real motive for taking in these deportees from the US, because in the process, he gets those MS-13 leaders who have a lot of dirt on him, back in El Salvador, where they're not going to be able to publicly expose him and his administration.

Brian Lehrer: Because they're in that prison. Last thing. What is supposed to happen to those deportees in the long run, the ones from Venezuela, as Trump or El Salvador see it? Assuming not the rest of their lives in those prisons, especially the ones who haven't been convicted of anything. Does the resumption of taking Venezuelans back, that was announced this weekend by the Venezuelan government, mean this disputed group will now be repatriated there?

Annie Correal: We don't really know. I think what has publicly been said, and what Bukele said, is that essentially the US government has agreed to pay Bukele per prisoner for a year, at least. Basically, these guys are kind of being farmed out to El Salvador.

Brian Lehrer: At what rate, by the way? What's the US taxpayer paying to hold these people in a third party country rather than just sending them back as deportees to their home country?

Annie Correal: Well, it's six million total. I've heard the number 20,000 per deportee. That number, we don't know if the US plans to deport more people to El Salvador, but so far we've heard six million total for one year, at least, that these prisoners are going to be held at CECOT, made to work and attend workshops. It's this so-called Zero Idleness program, and that they would be held for that time. I do think that one thing to watch, one thing for all of us to watch, is what happens to these Venezuelans who have been shown not to have any criminal record, not to be facing charges, not to have gang ties.

If there is anything to watch, it's whether-- who gets sent to El Salvador, and whether the Trump administration can allege that they are all alien enemies, because within this group that was sent last weekend, we know there were 101 people who were just in normal immigration proceedings, meaning that they were just probably going to be deported to Venezuela, and somehow they also got sent to El Salvador.

Brian Lehrer: That's like half of them.

Annie Correal: Right. About half of them were just in-- this is as per the Trump administration. According to the Trump administration, 101 of these people were not Tren de Aragua members who had been facing charges of committing violent crimes in the US or elsewhere. What we have heard, there's a Salvadoran journalist who does have good sources in this very, very impenetrable administration in El Salvador, and he tells us that the Venezuelans are being kept in a separate unit. They're not part of the CECOT general population, and that they've been given slightly better treatment, and that the government of El Salvador, until they investigate each case, is treating them all as migrants.

This is something to watch. What's going to happen with those people? What's going to happen with these conversations between El Salvador and the US as things move forward? Is Venezuela going to find a way to get those people out of CECOT? I think that's what we're watching now.

Brian Lehrer: Well, to be continued then. Another chapter is taking place in court today, I believe, as the Trump administration continues to respond or be unresponsive to the questions about all this from the judge in the case. Annie Correal covers Central America for The New York Times. Thank you for your reporting and taking the time to do this today with us.

Annie Correal: Thanks so much, Brian.

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